TimesToCome Mobile

Although I love my iPhone there are many things missing from the phone.  The biggest omission is the inability to store documents.  I’m really hoping someone will fix that soon.

I’ve learned to think of my iPhone as a dumb terminal rather than a smart phone that is only really useful when hooked to the central server.  Which means I’m getting to know all the local free wifi spots.

While I can’t store pdfs on my iPhone, I have mailed them all to a Yahoo email address I set up just for this purpose.  So any papers I’m reading I can get to from those emails.  One paper to an email and the subject line is the title of the paper.  There are several tricks online for storing pdfs on your iPhone, I’ve yet to get one to work for me.   I’m not sure any of the pdf tricks I’ve seen so far are worth the trouble.

So to keep my brain from getting mushy I downloaded a bunch of Google Tech Talk videos and I’ve been visiting the Podcast U section of the iTunes store and downloading university lectures.

The todo list is another glaring hole in iPhone applications.  I’ve been using the note pad, one note per category and listing my todos one per line.

Streaming radio can be found at FlyTunes

I can’t write and post to my Wordpress blogs from my iPhone without the iTunes/WM plugin . I can use the Flickr email and take a picture, write a blog post and send it through Flickr to my Wordpress blogs. Blogger will easily let you post by email.

I miss having ebooks on my phone.  For that I’ve been loading up on Free audio books.

So until things change and I’m hoping they will, that’s how I’m filling in the worst of the missing pieces from the iPhone. But that screen and battery life sure do a lot to compensate for the iPhone’s shortfalls.

The Apple cleaning rag that comes with the phone doesn’t do a good job of cleaning the screen. I use a 3M High Performance Cleaning Cloth that I’ve cut into smaller pieces.   You can find them at Amazon or your local discount stores, like Walmart.

Are you looking for an alternative to Opera or Pocket Internet Explorer? Check out NetFront. It is still in beta so be kind and expect a few bugs, but it is nice to see options in the phone browsers.

I haven’t yet tried it but initial users are raving about it on the phone forums.

One of the many things missing from the iPhone that is now standard on most phones is streaming radio. Lucky for us some one created FlyTunes You must first register by forking over an email address.

Click on the link in the email from the iPhone, finish the registration and your set. Just bookmark the page and it will remember you. There is a large selection of stations available, more than enough to suit most tastes.

Way back when in the dark days of computing we all had dumb terminals that hooked into a mainframe computer.   Your smart phone ( Palm/Blackberry/WindowsMobile) acts like a desktop computer with its own processor and software.

But what if we also made it behave like a dumb terminal (iPhone)? You could access the fastest computers and unlimited storage and memory. This is the first of I’m sure many such applications to come.

Accenture’s “Pocket Supercomputer” is in fact a phone behaving like a thin client. It can be used to send images and video of objects in real time to a server where they can be identified and linked to relevant information, which can then be sent back to the user.

The camera on the phone is used to take a video of an object — such as a book. According to the Accenture, the server software is smart enough to recognize the cover of the book — it’s not yet able to read text — and can then, for example, return the price and history of the book, and details of where it can be bought. . . [read more Accenture demos the 'Pocket Supercomputer']

If Apple fixed the bandwidth problem with the iPhone by moving it to a 3G network we will likely see a whole lot more of this type of application.

One of the first things you do with an iPhone is locate all the local free wifi spots. Edge just doesn’t cut it after using Sprints high speed network.

Starbucks and ATT are going to be offering 2 hours free wifi a day to registered holders of Starbucks cards this spring. No startup date yet.

JiWire Wifi finder is easy to use from your phone and will locate many but not all of the free wifi spots near you. Just type in a zip code or city.

Free wifi lists more locations than JiWire but is best used from your home computer. You can use it on your phone but it’s not the more phone friendly site.

Free Wi-Fi also lists free wifi by company which is sometimes an easier way to find free wifi as it becomes more common.

Mashable has a lengthly list of web resources for finding wifi many are for wifi outside the US.

Now that the airlines no longer let you take extra batteries in your checked or carry on luggage it’s even more important to get that extra time out of your cell phone battery.

1) Turn off anything you are not using, especially the IR port and bluetooth.

2) Turn down the screen brightness.

3) Turn off IM clients when not in use, they are serious drags on your juice. Texting is more efficient on your phone.

4) Turn off error reporting and customer feedback if it is on your phone.

5) Remove your phone from the charger when the battery is 100% do not leave it sit on the charger over night.  (* This came from a reasonable source, I have not tested it to see how much, if any, difference it makes. )

6) WM phones adjust power saver settings in your registry. (See Battery Hacks for more information about what you are doing. ) You can use PHM Registry Editor to make the edits to the registry.

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Comm\AsyncMac1\Parms]
Default value type and value are
“DisablePowerManagement”=dword:1
Change to
“DisablePowerManagement”=dword:0

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Comm\Irsir1\Parms]
Default value type and value are
“DisablePowerManagement”=dword:1
Change to
“DisablePowerManagement”=dword:0

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Comm\PPTP1\Parms]
Default value type and value are
“DisablePowerManagement”=dword:1
Change to
“DisablePowerManagement”=dword:0

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Comm\L2TP1\Parms]
Default value type and value are
“DisablePowerManagement”=dword:1
Change to
“DisablePowerManagement”=dword:0

Do you have a website you like to read but that isn’t mobile friendly?

Create a link to a rss version of the website like so.

Get the rss feed ->  Just control click the rss link and copy the link address.  For this site you should see: http://timestocomemobile.com/feed

Now create a Google reader link

http://www.google.com/reader/m/view/feed/http://timestocomemobile.com/feed

Take

http://www.google.com/reader/m/view/feed/

and add the feed address to the end

http://timestocomemobile.com/feed

to get:

http://www.google.com/reader/m/view/feed/http://timestocomemobile.com/feed

( yes you want the http:// in there at the beginning of the url and the beginning of the feed )

Now bookmark that page and you’ll have a mobile version of your favorite website.

1 ) Remember dates. When you take a picture with your cell phone camera a date stamp is put on the photo.

2) Remember where you parked your car. Take a picture of the sign showing the section, row or floor where you parked your car. That way after a long day’s shopping or vacation you’ll be able to find your car when you get home.

3) Take a picture of a recipe then you won’t need to make up a shopping list for the grocery store.